In the real world, science has developed technology that appears akin to the superhero power, but in reality is much less refined and directed. Clark Kent’s idealized penetrative gaze cuts a couple of corners when it comes to physics. Still, recent applications have a similar, albeit more contested and controversial, goal: airport surveillance.

Last Tuesday, the federal government announced that airports across Canada would be introducing full body scanners – large portals that use electromagnetic radiation to detect a weapon or bomb a traveller may have concealed beneath their clothing – to enhance security measures for U.S.-bound flights. The investment was sped up in response to the December 25 attempted bombing of Flight 253, travelling from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Using electromagnetic waves to detect materials like metal, the rays are unable to penetrate very far below the skin’s surface, producing a reflected three-dimensional image of, essentially, a naked human body – accessorized only by any metal or plastic items stowed on a person.

According to the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, the purchased portals belong to a new generation of scanners that use millimeter wave radiation, which, electromagnetically-speaking, is comparable to the microwave.

Shirley Lehnert, of the Montreal General Hospital’s Division of Radiation Oncology, said, “The energy of such radiation is too low to directly disrupt chemical bonds or cause electronic transitions.” She did, however, recognize there are some concerns with radiation such as this, which is also found in cell phones.

Another type of body imaging machine – first-generation scanners – use low-energy x-rays, which have a much higher frequency than millimeter waves. Frank Verhaegen, professor and head of research at the Maastro Clinic in the Netherlands, explained that the concern with these x-rays is the energy they deposit in your body during a scan – a potentially harmful effect, according to his research.

“It is well known that the lower their energy, the more damaging. X-rays do their damage by breaking DNA strands which may lead to genetic instability, cancer in the long-term, or acute diseases if the dose is high enough,” Verhaegen said.

While the millimeter wave technology is less damaging than these x-rays, Verhaegen was concerned about airports where the old x-ray scanners may still be in use. 

Beside the questions about health concerns, the scanners have also raised issues of privacy. Stéphane Leman-Langlois, associate professor of criminology at the Université de Montréal and author of Technocrime: Technology, Crime and Social Control, believes passengers should be turning their attention to this aspect of the technology.

“Scanners, with their actual impact on reducing terrorism or other crime, are in fact going to be used for other stuff…like a guy who forgot nail clippers in his…pocket,” said Leman-Langlois. “[Security guards are] going to catch a lot of these guys, whether they are trying to pass these things wittingly or unwittingly…. They’re going to catch zero terrorists.”

One reassurance seems to be that full body scanners do not disclose unique details about an individual’s identity: when your body is scanned, the security official does not discover your name or see your face.

However, the same cannot be said for other areas of surveillance research currently in development, like radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags for passports. Leman-Langlois explained that these computer chips can store information about identity and facial recognition, meaning that in the future, an airport official could scan a passport chip and instantly confirm you are who you claim to be.

“Any kind of card that contains information stored on an RFID chip is actually readable at a distance,” Leman-Langlois said. “But that means if [airports] can do it, anyone else can do it with less legitimate intentions.”

Leman-Langlois remained unconvinced that measures like digital passports and full body scanners would serve their security purposes effectively, pointing to the flaws of reactive security.

“The problem with this is that it assumes terrorists are going to try the same thing that they tried before,” he said. “In that loop of constantly reacting to small detailed actions that terrorists or criminals or whoever will come up with over the years, you’re never really going to catch up.”

Leman-Langlois called instead for proactive security, and old-fashioned investigation and intelligence.

“This is how you do security. It’s far less spectacular and it doesn’t have that appearance of the perfect, magic, one-security-fix that the portal has, but it works. The portal – we don’t know if it works or not.”

Scanners will be introduced to Canadian airports as soon as this month, but passengers can choose to submit to a physical pat-down instead, if they prefer.

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The final decisions are expected by the end of November, but with the CRTC primarily concerned with detailed regulatory legalities, some of net neutrality’s cornerstone principles could get overlooked. Stricter regulations may not pave the way for the equal, accessible Internet that users are bandying for.

What net neutrality means
Marshall Eubanks, Chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force in the United States, associates the controversy surrounding net neutrality with a lack of definitive clarity.

“I think net neutrality is one of those terms that has different meanings for different people and that’s…part of the problem with it. There’s a lot of noise about net neutrality,” says Eubanks. “There’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation.”

In a legal setting, net neutrality is often associated with a very technical definition, and refers specifically to prohibiting differential treatment of Internet packets such as intentionally slowing down one type of online program, but not another. To many people, a neutral network means more than that – essentially, an Internet free of any type of content restriction and serving as an open space for free speech.

A closer look at Deep Packet Inspection
ISPs use deep packet inspection to look under the layers of a chunk of Internet data traveling from one computer to another. Shallow inspection refers to simple Internet Protocol (IP) address recognition that tells the technology where to send the packet while deep inspection gives the network more information about what you are using a given program for. Eubanks compares it to reading the private contents of a letter rather than simply looking at the envelope’s address.

Deep packet inspection is central to more than one definition of net neutrality, since it enables ISPs to informatively decide if they want to slow a user’s Internet speed, for congestive or competitive reasons, or block them from specific content altogether.

“My personal feeling about many of these things,” says Eubanks, “is if I’m paying for a service, I expect it to come. If the postman says ‘Well, you’re going to get these letters one day, but…the post office is going to provide its own DVD rental service, so Netflix will take two weeks to get to you,’ I’d object to that. So that is where deep packet inspection really starts rearing its head.”

Why do ISPs impose restrictions?
Many telecommunications companies contend that prioritizing Internet traffic is a necessary management tool, and Bell Canada claims that this is the best way for them to serve their customers during peak congestion times.

“[Our traffic shaping practices] are designed to improve the overall user experience for the vast majority of users,” says John Daniels, Vice-President, Regulatory Law for Bell Canada, in the recorded transcripts of the CRTC proceedings on July 14, 2009.

Some ISPs offer their customers access to more programs more frequently, but at a higher price. Still, there is reason to believe that this type of net neutrality restriction might not have very much clout in the near future. The fourth day of the CRTC hearings brought forth expert opinion that the latest technology is surprisingly more than adequate to handle the current Internet traffic demand.

The Canadian disadvantage
Canada has far fewer “big-name” Internet service providers to choose from, making a truly competitive market unattainable, at least for the moment. Milton Mueller, a professor at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies, takes note of the difference across the border from the United States.

“I believe that if you had a fully competitive market, there’d be almost no discrimination and no net neutrality problem because no Internet service provider really gets a competitive advantage from blocking certain services and certain kinds of traffic that some of their customers might want,” Mueller says. “It’s when they do have some market power that they’re able to make those discriminations and then…impose them on you.”

Where we’re headed
The CRTC in Canada and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States are both working at net neutrality from a technical regulatory standpoint, an approach that Mueller dislikes.

“I’d like to see net neutrality operated…not as a detailed regulation,” he says, “but as a principle that customers have the right to access any content -any lawful content- on the Internet that they like.”

The post Neutralizing the net appeared first on The McGill Daily.

A paper titled “Self-Control relies on glucose as a limited energy source: Will power is more than a metaphor,” published in 2007 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggests that self-control is like a muscle – exercising it can tire it out. Active self-control also seems to correlate with high levels of glucose, a carbohydrate that serves as the body’s main energy source, but researchers acknowledge that it is not the only carb-requiring process.

“All brain processes use some glucose, though some use more than others and are therefore more susceptible to fluctuations of the supply in the bloodstream,” according to the article.

So, the science behind self-control may be fascinating, but it comes down to being able to think properly. This conclusion is a little more intuitive than I’d hoped, but it makes a whole lot of sense if we realize the times we are the most unable to think properly and the times we exercise the least self-control really are one and the same – when we’re drunk.

We’ve all participated in the inevitable morning-after cursing of the drink. “Why’d I do that?” “Why’d I go there?” “Why’d I think I could jump off of that, naked?” And potentially the most worrisome: “Why’d I say that?” Exes, friends, bosses, parents: they’re all a call, email, or wall post away, meaning that they could be privy to any embarrassing or damaging tidbit on our glucose-absent minds. And we’re all becoming obsessed with ways to restrain ourselves. Even the technology that gives us this unlimited access is trying to help us be cautious while using it.

I thought about trying a cell phone feature that allows you to block a contact’s number on your phone. No calls, no texts. That person is unreachable for the length of time of your choice. The slogan promises to protect me from myself, but it is not only meant to be an anti-drunk dialing tool; it is also some kind of social norm “fixer.”

“Mail Goggles” is an email feature I downloaded after an unmentionable drunken email mix-up. With this program active, I can’t send an email until proving my competence by first completing five math problems within 60 seconds. Delightedly, I discovered I could also set the days and times of operation myself. It is “student-customized,” so to speak, for those of you who, like me, find that Wednesday mid-afternoon is prime inebriation time.

The problem is that reconfiguring the settings is a whole lot easier than answering five math questions in 60 seconds, and of course, it didn’t take my drunk self too long to realize that. Turns out I’ve found a way to protect myself from the me that’s protecting myself.

That’s the thing. I think if we really want to do something, we will find a way, despite phone number blockers and late night math problems. It is all there in the word: self-control. Technological blockers only mean that we will resort to more drastic measures to get what we want. Maybe instead of calling or emailing, we will go over to that person’s house, throw rocks at the window, probably break said window, and end up paying for the replacement as well as the cell phone feature that was supposed to prevent all this.

No matter how many ways we try to make sure we’re never awkward, embarrassing, or rash, we’ll never be perfect. I like it that way. Let’s all just be awkward, embarrassing, and rash together. Laugh at your mistakes and give in to what you want; just blame it on glucose deficiency.

Get all liquored up and send your deepest, darkest thoughts to lostintranscription@mcgilldaily.com.

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Both shows tried to make learning the “hows” and “whys” of the universe accessible and exciting, but besides that, they were pretty different from each other. Bill’s lab was dynamic, loud, and hectic: lamps were thrown off the roof to demonstrate gravity, chemicals were being mixed left, right, and centre, and scientific concepts were distilled down to really basic ideas. And every episode ended with a pun-riddled music video parody, like “Baby I Love Your Wave” by Big Amplitude. Then there was Miss Frizzle, driving a school bus-submarine-spaceship-time machine full of academically-inclined, adventurous children experiencing the wildest science field trips of their lives. Being an animated TV show allowed for some suspension of disbelief, and these kids got to grow from seeds to plants, fall from the sky as raindrops, and get baked into pies.

I always was and always will be on the Frizz side of TV science. Yeah, it’s all well and good to watch Bill Nye demonstrate digestion by gesturing emphatically with a rubber tube that’s supposed to represent my digestive tract, but isn’t it clearer when we’re with a bus full of kids and actually squeezing through an esophagus instead? Bill made a “stomach balloon of science,” but in The Magic School Bus we were churning in a real, albeit cartoon, stomach of science.

The Magic School Bus was also about kids discovering things for themselves. Bill told us straight up that food “goes into our small intestine and that’s where enzymes – special chemicals that we have – absorb all the chemicals that we need from our food.” But on a Frizzle field trip, we saw it. Carlos floated in Arnold’s small intestine, looked at the villi and said, “This dissolved food is disappearing into these rubber cactus-type things!”

I will concede, however, that Bill Nye taught us more about the technicalities of science, and that his shows covered a wider range of topics. But saying things really loudly while wearing a bowtie didn’t mean I’d learn the concept. The Magic School Bus might have been more concerned with entertainment, but the storylines are why I still remember how volcanoes explode, what makes an engine run, and why Arnold turned orange after eating only Seaweedies for weeks.

But can learning about science still be fun once we’re too old for shows like these? Just because there isn’t an outrageously eccentric televised science teacher for adult audiences doesn’t mean that learning has to stop. We just have to be our own magic school bus or our own science guy, and re-inspire past enthusiasms for ourselves. It’s important not to let our old interests fall by the wayside when there are so many ways to learn about the latest scientific advancements and fascinating discoveries. We’re all grown-ups now; we don’t have to feed into the idea that science is boring. It’s time for green chemistry, nano engineering, digital broadcasting – science – to be cool again. Come on, we all know it is.

Send “Ms Frizzle for Prime Minister” petitions to lostintranscription@mcgilldaily.com

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Without thinking twice, most living in North America would uphold the rights of the patient to full medical disclosure. We live in an “I”-centered time and place, alive with individualistic responsibilities and rights. When it comes to medicine, the truth is one of those important rights. But I think some sometimes dismiss the impact that the phrase “it doesn’t look good” can have on a person’s recovery.

After some very brief dabbling in anthropology courses at McGill, I’ve learned that patient autonomy and bioethics are relatively new concepts. Until recently, in Japan and Italy for example, physicians practiced more protective, less divulging discussions of prognosis and treatment with cancer patients. A paper by anthropologist Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good entitled “Cultural Studies of Biomedicine” explains that, “ambiguity in the face of mortal illness is prized in both [Japanese and Italian] societies; it is considered a quality of clinical interactions necessary to maintain patients’ hope and will to combat disease.”

From an outside perspective, it’s easy to criticize a protective system like this. But, in recent years, the world has seen huge movements in patients’ rights that shift toward Western bioethics – even in Japan and Italy.

But should we dismiss the effect that this kind of information has on us? If you were told that you only had a year, or a few months, or a few weeks left to live, you would probably like to think you would carpe diem the hell out of your life, do everything you’ve always wanted to do. But could you manage to do it all with this knowledge looming over you? Your approach to the news could affect how your body heals. How many of us would be able to summon the mental conviction to fight, and how many of us would be too scared to do anything? Would we gain or lose hope in the face of illness?

The traditional practices of Japan and Italy might seem far off from Western medicine, but really they’re both trying to tackle that question of hope. The Western point of view says people are more hopeful when they have all the facts, statistics, and options in front of them, but for other cultures, those things can be seen as detrimental.

The common link, however, is the belief that the mind plays an important role in the body’s healing process, something medical science is recognizing more and more. We may not fully understand the chemistry of it yet, but we’ve all heard enough examples of the placebo effect at work to know that a person’s attitude, faith, and mental process can play a powerful role in her health.

Still, can someone else really decide what you’re better off not knowing? If ethics and their implications for medical disclosure clearly depend on culture and situation, maybe in some cases, ignorance is bliss. I don’t pretend to know the answer, but maybe one day my body will tell me.

Send tips on how to carpe diem the hell out of your life to lostintranscription@mcgilldaily.com. Positive prognoses also welcome.

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Carpal tunnel syndrome, meningitis, liver failure, kidney failure, spinal muscular atrophy, Dengue fever – these are only a small sampling of conditions whose symptoms I have felt vividly. This past summer, I visited my local walk-in clinic five times in four weeks complaining of headaches, convinced I had a brain tumour. Once, the physician “soothed” my concerns by listing off a string of symptoms that would have had to be present if there was something serious to worry about. Of course, by my next visit, I had produced them all.

Finally, to relieve my concerns, the clinic agreed to x-ray my head, and while they found nothing big, scary, or tumour-like taking over my skull, the x-ray did reveal an interesting surprise in my nose: a deviated septum I’d never known of. The doctor turned to me and asked, “were you dropped on your head as a baby?” I’m sure she was insinuating more than the irregularity of my septum.

I think I first knew I had a problem when I heard myself say, “Well, I’m worried I might develop schizophrenia, since I don’t have a very good sense of smell.” Turns out, I completely misread the web site from which I was attempting to self-diagnose.

I frequently use the Internet to aid and abet my hypochondriac tendencies. When I become attuned to several new symptoms, my choice consultant is wrongdiagnosis.com. The beautiful thing about this site is its multiple symptom checker, but, according to its diagnosis, I have apparently been suffering from leprosy for over a year now.

Should we all be a little concerned about having diagnoses such as this one only a few clicks away? Will so much readily accessible information convert users into “cyberchondriacs?” After talking to Dr. Robert Franck, Clinical Director of McGill Mental Health Services, I came to realize that an increase in information availability can’t be to blame as long as the site is reputable, and as long as users aren’t searching out of anxiety.

“You have to think about why you’re looking for the information,” Franck says.

Dr. Gordon Asmundson, professor and director of the Anxiety and Illness Behaviours Lab at the University of Regina, has a similar view.

“Sources of medical information aren’t necessarily a bad thing,” he says. “For certain people, they can become a habitual source of reassurance that makes them feel better in the short term, but not in the long term.”

But Asmundson’s research has also led him to online support groups and discussion boards for people with hypochondria, which actually fuel rather than dissipate anxiety. He says that in these cases, the Internet may be harmful.

“[It] means unlimited access to people with shared experiences, something we didn’t have 20 years ago,” Asmundson said.

Basically, we have to accept a little more responsibility for our online searches, and google cautiously. Or, maybe just avoid these sites. Easier said than done for some of us.

As Franck made clear, if you look hard enough, you can always feel a pain or an itch somewhere on your body.

“These things are natural,” he says. “If you feel a bump or an ache, chances are it’s just telling you you’re alive.”

I can accept that. The day will come when my liver fails, my heart stops beating, and my cells start multiplying out of control, but for now I’ll be thankful that all I’m really suffering from is not suffering from anything at all.

The post Lost In Transcription: Confessions of a hypochondriac appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Now, there was scientific rationale behind the hypothesis: other research has shown that a longer ring finger is a sign of higher exposure to testosterone in the womb, which in turn creates sensitivity to the hormone later in life, which then makes those people more apt to react to things quickly and to take more risks. Got that? Lots of testosterone means you become sensitive to it, this makes you get all risky and dangerous, and to top it off, you get an extra-large ring finger.

So, yes, this chain may sound a little unbelievable, and the interesting thing here is that the article demonstrates how much we love finding anatomical patterns that explain other aspects of ourselves. Breaking away from scientific research, there are tons of myths out there that people believe to varying degrees; whether it’s the famous comparison of a male’s forefinger length to the size of his package or the idea that a man’s height is related to how high he climbs on the business ladder, we absolutely love thinking we can read a certain characteristic as a clue for another. Do our bodies really reveal that kind of information, or is this a human fabrication of fascination?

Our preoccupation is definitely not a new one. A popular 19th century discipline was phrenology, the study of a person’s skull and facial features to determine their personality traits. And people took it really seriously – basing decisions like who to marry on the length of a nose, or how a person’s upper lip curved.

Of course, the problem with looking for these types of patterns and relationships in a statistical way is that it can get out of hand very easily. Eugenics comes along, and all of a sudden this pseudoscience is a tool to promote stereotypes and racism. Nazism is one historical example, but the trend stretches back to the early 20th century. Early eugenicists twisted Darwin’s ideas of evolution into an idea of racial superiority, establishing a spectrum of evolution that placed Europeans as the most “highly evolved” people and Africans as more “primitive.” In one famous case, a Congolese man named Ota Benga was brought to the United States in 1904 and exhibited in the World’s Fair and the Bronx Zoo, labelled as a link between primates and humans. He was even caged up with an orangutan so visitors could note similarities in stature and smile. Disturbingly, these “human zoos,” as they were called, were very common.

Is there a more productive, less harmful way to relate anatomical patterns to other human characteristics? What if we could observe a person’s favourite colour by the fissures on their skull, or find out something about their study habits by how far apart their eyes are? Would we be able to notice these things without categorizing people or even ostracizing them? Even if these types of relationships existed and we could study them effectively, it would still be a shortcut to getting to know someone, and a pretty limited, black and white assessment at that. Most of us hope for a bit more complexity in our personalities.

So you can check your hand right now to see if you should be a top financial trader or if you’ll just have to settle for being very well-endowed, but chances are you probably believe it doesn’t really work that way.

Diane’s column will appear every other Friday. To give her the finger, email lostintranscription@mcgilldaily.com

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